WordPress, the most popular CMS available today is used for
building all types of websites such as eCommerce, social network, business
sites etc. However, the only downside of using WordPress is its speed, since
most of the WordPress sites are slow compared to other sites. As site speed is
an important ranking factor for websites in the search engines, it is critical
to sort this issue. Here are 12 tips to assist you in improving a WordPress
site speed for the best user experience.
1. Go for a Good Hosting Service
The web hosting service you choose affects the loading speed
of your site. A good web hosting
company is still important if your website isn’t running on WordPress. A number
of web hosting companies provide competitive web hosting packages, so research
around to find the right one for your business.
2. Use a CDN
CDN stands for a content delivery network, a system of
distributed servers that offers web resources and web pages to users based on
their geographic location. CDN copies the CSS, JavaScript and media files of
your website to render them quickly to the users.
3. Install a Cache Plugin
Cache is a temporary storage space to store content such as
web pages, images, and files etc. It helps to load web contents quickly for the
users, reducing site speed time by a great amount. There are various WordPress Plugins available
to implement caching of a WordPress site. W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache are the
most popular WordPress cache Plugins.
4. Compress CSS and JavaScript Files
You can minify your website CSS and JavaScript files to
compress their original size to a minimum possible size to render them quickly
on the browser. You can either use YUI
Compress, a manual compressing system or a WP Minify for an automatic
compression of your CSS and JS files.
5. Compress Large Images
Large images also contribute to the slow speed of a site.
Use WP SmushIt plugin to
reduce the size of large images without comprising on quality.
6. Compress Entire Website
Website Compression turns all site content into a Zip file.
When a client requests a web page, his/her browser acts like a WINRAR
application to fetch and show the page contents to the user. This may sound
like hard work, but it is simple to implement and works really well.
W3 Total Cache is a good option to use for site compression.
Go to Admin Page -> Performance -> Browser Cache -> Enable HTTP (gzip)
Compression.
7. Optimize Website Database
WordPress database saves everything automatically such as
trackbacks, pingbacks, trashed items, comments marked as spam and even the
unapproved comments. This causes a WordPress database to fragmentize like a
system hard drive. A couple of good
plugins to optimize your database are WP-Optimize and WP-DB Manager.
8. Install Good Plug-ins only
Plugins also add a lot of junk to your site files. Only keep the ones critical to your site
performance to reduce site load time.
9. Disable Pingbacks and Trackbacks
Pingbacks and
Trackbacks are simple notifications sent to a site, every time it gets
mentioned by someone on the internet.
Go to Admin Page ->Settings -> Discussion and uncheck
the first two checkboxes to turn this feature off. It will not harm your site
performance
10. Always Select a Good Theme
Not all WordPress themes are coded equally. Some are fast
and some are sloppy. Observe the load
speed time of theme’s demo to get an idea about its impact on your site load
time.
11. Optimize Site Home Page Structure
Keep your homepage optimized to show a minimum number of
widgets and post excerpts. This would not only enhance your site speed but
would also make for a great user experience.
12. Enable “Keep-Alive” Feature
HTTP Keep-Alive uses Transmission Control Protocol to send
multiple HTTP requests, instead of opening a new connection for every request.
Your web host might already have this implemented, but if not, you can copy
this line in your .htaccess to enable the Keep-Alive feature.
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